Graduate Study in English at SMU

M.A. Program

The department maintains a terminal M.A. program.  Applicants to the M.A. will be admitted under a different set of standards, but students will study with the same faculty as the Ph.D. students. The M.A. is for those who wish to study English at an advanced level for a variety of reasons, such as: to enhance their teaching in K-12 schools or to teach in community colleges; to improve their research and writing skills; to supplement undergraduate education in order to apply to Ph.D. programs; to enhance their appreciation of English literature.   This program will not supply financial support for students.

Degree Requirements:

The Masters Degree in English is for students pursuing the M.A. as a terminal degree. Subsequent admission to the Ph.D. program requires a separate application. 

Students admitted to the M.A. Program are required to take English 6310 (Advanced Literary Studies) and 27 additional hours, 30 hours total for the degree.  With departmental approval, six graduate hours in a related field may be substituted for courses in the English Department.

Before graduation, each candidate must pass an oral examination on a list of about 40 works related to a critical or thematic focus determined by the candidate in consultation with a faculty adviser.

Students have two program options. The first is the thesis option, which requires 24 hours of course work and six hours (English 6398 and 6399) devoted to writing a scholarly thesis. Students who write a thesis must take three pro-seminars (ENGL 6320 through 6380) or seminars (7311 through 7376). The thesis, typically about 50 to 70 pages long, is written under the close supervision of a faculty adviser. The non-thesis option requires 30 hours of course work, including four proseminars or seminars.

The M.A. Oral Examination:

Every candidate for the M.A. in English must pass an oral examination. For this examination, the candidate will present a reading list of 30 to 40 works produced in consultation with his/her orals advisor or thesis director and approved by the Director of Graduate Studies. The design of the list should reflect a "framework" that provides some critical perspective on the material. The candidate will provide the orals committee with a description and rationale for this framework. The list must include major canonical works from periods both preceding and following 1700, and must include works by Chaucer and Shakespeare. In addition, the list must include both British and American literature and may include other non-British literatures.

The intention is that the candidate will provide an organizing theme, genre, interpretive problem, etc. that will allow the exam to explore a wide range of material while retaining a critical focus. For example, choosing first-person lyric poetry as a genre might require not only that the candidate read several significant works in that form, but that he or she also read and be ready to discuss its relation to and difference from first-person narrative poetry, the soliloquy, frame narratives, and other related forms. The candidate should know something about the critical problems presented by first-person discourse and how writers have approached the issues over time. The exam itself should show that the candidate has carefully thought out a problem, as displayed by a command of the exam's framework and reading list. For those candidates who choose the thesis option, the exam's design should in addition give evidence of the candidate's having thought out a subject and approach for the thesis.

You should be meeting with your chosen advisor at least five or six times over the course of a semester. The more you discuss your proposal and your choices of texts, both with your advisor and with other professors, the more you will be rehearsing for the actual examination, and the more comfortable you will be with your ideas. Last minute attempts to gather together a reading list, a proposal, and a supervisor will probably result in failure; as a guideline, you should have all three ready by the beginning of the term in which you intend to take the examination.

A plan for adequate preparation should also follow these guidelines: a) the proposal and reading list should be scrupulously proof-read (this is a degree in English; spelling mistakes in titles and the names of authors are especially bad, if not fatal); b) you must know the who-what-where-when-why-and-how of your chosen texts (memorized quotations of significant lines or phrases, moreover, will be most welcome); c) you must be able to demonstrate that you have read the whole text. You should be able to provide all prospective examiners with a complete proposal and list at least one week prior to the examination.